It’s the season of graduate-thesis shows — the best time to discover up-and-coming artists. Local art schools have launched the careers of luminaries such as Ellsworth Kelly, Ellen Gallagher, and Sam Durant. Here’s a peek at some of the outstanding artists from Boston University, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who have work on view this spring.

Bashezo, “2. Blackened Corridor.”

Bashezo, 45

Installation/performance art

Massachusetts College of Art and Design

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“What does it mean to be seen as a threat?” asks Bashezo, a gender non-binary person of color.

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Bashezo’s work honors the dead, stakes territory for the displaced, and removes scales from people’s eyes. It’s anchored in sacred rituals drawn from Lucumi, an Afro-Cuban religion.

The artist also critiques institutional rigidity.

MassArt workers’ uniforms hang on a line in Bashezo’s thesis installation. “They’re people who don’t have the resources or the access to attend,” the artist says.

Visitors walk through a narrow black corridor. Bashezo requested four black walls and got three; gallery staff initially resisted any paint, due to time and space limitations.

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“This is the amount of space I feel I have within an institution,” says the artist. In performances, Bashezo paints the walls white — a condition of having blackened them.

“Painting the walls white,” the artist says, “is contributing to my own erasure.”

“Home, A Pop-Up Show” Distillery Gallery, South Boston, May 26-27

Andrew Stansbury, “Waiting to Bloom,” 2017.

Andrew Leo Stansbury, 30

Ceramics/performance art

UMass Dartmouth

“I grew up believing I was a monster,” says Stansbury. Gay and closeted, he was a Baptist boy in small-town Texas. “I didn’t come out until I was 25. I’ve been making clay longer than I’ve been out.”

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His ceramics walk the line between ornate and grotesque. They stand on their own, but he also photographs himself wearing them. His inspiration: nightmares. For instance, Stansbury says, he might dream his face is “boiling over and mutating into growths.”

When he wakes up, he heads to the studio. The clay pieces — glossy, often color-saturated — are strangely alluring.

In the stark, tender photographs, the ceramics reveal as much as they hide; they are at once a burden and a badge of honor.

Stansbury predicts his work will get wilder. “How far can I take it?” he asks. “Post-election, I realized: Now is the time. Don’t hide. I’m a big, beautiful gay man.”

“Game of Chance,” Freight Gallery & Studios, San Antonio, through June 7

After college, Beavers did field work in forestry and wetlands. Then a John Singer Sargent show drew her to art school.

Her thesis installation marries those two passions. She fills a darkened space with animation, a James Turrell-style light piece, and prints and sculptures on light boxes. The work addresses the effects of ice melting in the Arctic Sea.

“Trying to understand an ecosystem is difficult. You have to poke and prod from different angles, and piece together an idea of what’s happening,” says Beavers. “I’m trying to mimic that here.”

The animation depicts burgeoning algae blooms. The light piece documents noontime in winter, when the Arctic sees no sun.

Sounds of water dripping and ice cracking make the installation seem real, yet ethereal.

Suverkrubbe’s squirmy, giant, shaped canvas bubbles off the wall, which makes sense, given the gyrations of the people depicted on it. It’s a comic marvel of sex and gore, with hearts bursting from chests, knobby, tangled limbs, and jutting penises. Each of seven scenes boils down to an unsettling relationship between the characters.

“It’s about my fault in my relationships with other people. Not necessarily romantic or sexual,” says Suverkrubbe. “It’s about interpersonal conflict.

The painter’s neurotic, graphic style recalls R. Crumb. She spices her Pepto-pink palette with fiery reds and yellows. One figure wears a huge grin and cuddles up to another with coins covering eyes. In another, a pigtailed figure feasts on the heart of a character munching on an apple.

“In some [scenes], there’s a willingness on the part of the other person,” says the artist. “I’d like to get to the point where it feels like they’re both aggressors.”